Daily declarations from the Wall Street Journal columnist.

Viva Rubio

What a great, myth-destroying statement from Marco Rubio, on the floor of the U.S. Senate yesterday afternoon, on the facts about Cuba and their connection to events in Venezuela.

We have pressed in these parts for American political figures to speak clearly and with moral confidence about American sympathies in various international disputes. Rubio’s speech is honest political indignation successfully deployed.

Late last month Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa came back from a week-long trip to Cuba full of the wonders he’d seen. In a meeting with reporters he spouted inanities that were clichés a quarter-century ago: Cuba has fabulous health services, everyone can read. Yesterday Harkin decided to haul his inanities onto the floor of the Senate. Rubio heard what he’d said and followed him on the floor soon after.

Rubio pointed out Cuba has fabulous health services only if you believe a totalitarian government’s health statistics, its people can read only what that government allows them to read. They are an abused people in an oppressed culture.

What Rubio was speaking of is the moral meaning of things and the need for America to recognize and address the moral meaning of things. America should not stand mute when presented with political dramas in other nations, particularly when they occur in our own hemisphere. We have a voice. We should use it. If we don’t show our sympathies, who will? If we do not articulate our values and beliefs, who will?

What to do in the future about Cuba—what relations to have with it and policies to adopt toward it—is the subject of legitimate debate. How to approach and respond to what is happening in Venezuela is a matter of debate. But you can’t begin that debate with fan fiction. You begin it with facts and go from there.

If you don’t get the facts right, you’ll never get the policy right. And it does the world no good to see a great power fallen into relentless, mealy-mouthed obfuscation. That only adds to the slump-shouldered, depressed feeling that a lack of clarity always brings.

Rubio’s statement may make a bigger impression on the Republican base than he perhaps expected, and the pundit class may start to see him again as a 2016 force. An observation: Everyone in national politics worries about getting the right speech text, the right words. But Rubio got the words and meaning right through notes and pictures, not a prepared text. Cesar Conda, Rubio’s chief of staff, said the senator had intended to speak that day on Venezuela, but included Cuba because he wanted “to set the record straight.”

Comments (5 of 39)

Way to go, Noonan! Cheerleader for the reactionary descendants of the 1% who got out of Cuba before Castro and Che descended from the Sierra Maestra; and who themselves rah rah for the 1% here, and their globist military interventionists, who make of our sword paper mache, and of our country a second-rate nation using its last capital gasps to intervene everywhere.
By the way, Wyoming, both by self-proclamation and licence plate is either the "Equality state"or the "Cowboy"state. By licence plate and Pulitzer, my native state, Montana, is the source and embodiment of the "big sky". Though I found your opinion piece on the West harmless and mostly peacefully descriptive of the West I was fortunate enough to be born into, it begins with a prosaic, if not factual, error. But that's okay, understandable for "Tenderfoot". Sad fact is that there are so many escapee tenderfoots alighted here in the recent decades, who, not as gentle as you, know not themselves due to the breadth of America, but are Capitalist escapees who care not of the culture of this state, but are molding it into yet another stop in the strip mall that's here, covered over with disappeared bear tracks, and become full-throat Reddest of the Red, racist Teapartiers who seek to incorporate both war and the country.
Sorry(for me as well as you) I couldn't find a way to comment (more benignly, I'm sure) on American Diversity and the Wild West. Bill in Missoula, Montana

10:44 am March 27, 2014

Jim from Rockport, Tx wrote:

Castro had to be a student of Saul Alinsky in order to accomplish what he has done. On a bit larger scale, obama is doing the same thing here. If you wonder what I am referring to, google Alinsky Rules for Revolution. There are eight steps and all in progress. We are becoming a Communist nation.

10:51 am March 8, 2014

Ted Dacko wrote:

Anyone notice that Putin annexed part of the Ukraine the same week that Obama proved that he could not spell RESPECT?

9:09 am March 6, 2014

Bodenmaiser wrote:

A Swiss customer of our tour group slipped on a hotel stairwell in Havana this past December. Cuban healthcare gave him every known infection and he slipped into a coma. Airlifted to Miami, he unfortunately could not be saved and died on December 26

8:37 pm March 5, 2014

Doug Brockman wrote:

Would this be the same Tom Harkin who enslaved us to Big Ethanol and spent billions on inane quack nostrums complete with their own government bureaucracy?

About Peggy Noonan's Blog

Peggy Noonan is a writer. For twelve years she has been a weekly columnist for the Wall Street Journal. She is the author of eight books on American politics, history and culture. She was a special assistant to president Ronald Reagan, and before that was a producer and writer at CBS News in New York.